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Changing course: A new approach to opioid pain medication at FDA

As a doctor, I have a first-hand understanding of the important and legitimate need for powerful medication to help people deal with chronic or severe pain. If you have had a family member or loved one touched by a serious illness or injury, you understand it too. You know how tough it can be to see them try to endure pain that can’t be touched by anything you can get over the counter.

But as all of you know, more Americans now die every year from drug overdoses than they do in motor vehicle crashes. Opioids were involved in 28,648 deaths in 2014, according to the CDC.

The FDA is deeply concerned about this growing epidemic, and I am personally disturbed by the toll it has taken in communities across the country. It’s an issue I’ve been involved with for years as an academic, having overseen the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse Clinical Trial Network, which was involved in some of the early medication assisted treatment studies.

After seeing the dependence and mortality numbers continue to rise and hearing from voices who care about this issue, I asked our folks to take a hard look at whether we’re doing everything we can to ensure that we’re appropriately taking into account the public health crisis that confronts us in the context of the role we play in ensuring the safety and efficacy of drugs.

The conclusion of that comprehensive assessment was that we can do more.

So we are announcing a change in course in how our agency approaches opioids – their approval, their labeling and their prescribing. We are going to fundamentally re-examine the risk-benefit paradigm for opioids and ensure that we consider their wider public health effects.

To that end, we have developed a comprehensive action plan to take concrete steps toward reducing the impact of opioid abuse on American families and communities.

There are four main pillars to the plan.

First, we’re going to be more transparent and open in the approval process for this category of drugs. Starting today, the FDA will convene an expert advisory committee before approving any new drug application for an opioid that is not in an abuse-deterrent formulation (ADF).

Additionally, we’re going to engage the Pediatric Advisory Committee to make recommendations on pediatric opioid labeling before any new labeling is approved.

Importantly, the advisory committee process is going to provide opportunity for public input, which is going to help us better understand and answer the concerns people have about these drugs.

We have also engaged the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on how to take into account our evolving understanding of the risks of opioids, not only to the patient but also the risks of misuse by other persons who obtain them. The goal is to formally incorporate the broader public health impact of opioid abuse in approval decisions. And in March, we will seek advice from the Agency’s Science Board to reassess the risk-benefit approval framework for opioid use. The results of these efforts will be made public.

Second, we’re going to improve our communication with the medical community about these drugs. That starts with enhancing safety labeling. Our goal is to provide better information to doctors about the risks of these drugs and how to safely prescribe them. We’re developing changes to immediate release opioid labeling that will bring it more in line with the extended-release/long-acting labeling that occurred in 2013.

After reviewing the existing requirements and hearing recommendations from an advisory committee, we’re also going to update our Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) program requirements for opioids. We need to increase the number of prescribers who receive training on pain management and improve the safe prescribing of opioids to decrease inappropriate prescribing.

That effort will complement work being done at the Department level and at the CDC to help ensure that opioids are prescribed appropriately. We believe that this is a key component of ending this public health crisis. The more than 250 million prescriptions for these types of pain killers in 2012 – enough for every adult in the U.S. to have a bottle of pills – is clear evidence of the work ahead of us.

Third, we’re going to work to improve the information that’s available about opioid use. We’re going to require drugmakers to strengthen post-market analysis of these drugs. Today, that information, especially about long-term use, is lacking. We need more and better evidence on the risks of misuse and abuse associated with long-term opioid use and to better understand predictors of addiction, among other issues.

Finally, we’re going to focus efforts on approving drugs that have the potential to help mitigate the crisis. That means spurring the development of promising generics with abuse deterrent formulations. The FDA will issue draft guidance with its recommendations for the approval standards for generic abuse-deterrent formulations. We believe the availability of less costly generic products should accelerate prescribers’ update of abuse deterrent formulations.

And we’re going to work to improve access to naloxone, which is effective at treating overdoses. The FDA is reviewing options, including over-the-counter availability, to make naloxone more accessible. That work builds on FDA’s recent approval of intranasal naloxone.

What I’ve just described is a change in course – a framework for how FDA can better do its part to confront the opioids epidemic. In the coming weeks and months, we’re going to further develop these plans and continue to fill in the details for each initiative I’ve described.

But it’s time for us to act – to take the first steps toward changing how we do business and addressing this problem.

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